'An absorbing take on the relationship between humans and computers': Scott Hutchins.

A Working Theory of Love, Scott Hutchins's first full-length novel, introduces us to Neill Bassett, a divorced man adrift in San Francisco. He is employed by a Silicon Valley startup to converse with a computer program based on journals kept by his dead father, to help it beat the "Turing test" (of a machine's ability to behave with human intelligence), and this simulacrum of his dad leads Bassett to reconsider his approach to life, particularly when it comes to a certain young woman.

Hutchins is a 38-year-old creative writing lecturer at Stanford University, and his debut has been likened to the work of Nick Hornby. "I'm honoured to be compared to him," says Hutchins. "At my first grad school class, many years ago, we were asked what books we were reading. Everyone else talked about Ulysses or Infinite Jest, literature with a capital L, but I said I'd just read High Fidelity and I loved it. He's a writer who's incredibly energetic, funny and smart, but he wears it lightly."

Hutchins has previously been published in the New York Times and Esquire, as well as San Franciscan literary magazine The Rumpus, but A Working Theory of Love emerged after five years of writing short excerpts and stitching them together, which proved to be a challenging process.

"I was blithely unconcerned with how this was going to come together," he says. "I would have written it in a more rational way if I could have. I just don't know if it's in me."

Humorous and quietly profound, the novel offers an absorbing take on the relationship between humans and computers. Twin interests fuelled its creation: trying to define what it means to be human; and Hutchins's experience of being a single man (he has married since). "It was something of a hybrid in its concept," he says, "but I think the questions that the Turing test asks, such as how do I determine who's really a person, who counts as a person in my life, are relevant to your romantic life and your vision of yourself. I found a lot of overlap."